79 - Scott Wagner, GoDaddy CEO: Big Plans for Small Businesses

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I loved in college, I loved economics and microeconomics and figuring out how stuff works.

Few companies have gone through the kind of image transformation GoDaddy has over the past decade. Back in 2005, GoDaddy launched its first commercial that used women in revealing outfits and sexually suggestive themes to sell web services. Wagner became GoDaddy CEO at the beginning of this year, and those commercials are long gone. Today's GoDaddy bears little resemblance to the one of a decade ago, which is probably a good thing given how cultural winds have shifted. I talked to Wagner about his journey to the CEO seat and what he's working to do with the products and the culture. I'm John Forte from CNBC, and you're listening to the Forte Knox Podcast, Rich Ideas and Powerful People. I do this weekly, bringing you the highest achievers. We're going to learn how the very best climb to the top and pull out lessons along the way. If that sounds good to you, make this a habit and subscribe. I got some time with Scott Wagner at the CODE conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. We talked about leadership, culture, and what it'll take for small businesses to thrive in this latest wave of the digital economy. We also streamed the conversation live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the CNBC apps on Apple TV. and Amazon Fire TV. Here's Scott Wagner.

A lot of people got to know this company through some pretty out-there ads, which would never run today because we have the Time's Up movement, Me Too. GoDaddy started going through this transformation before all of that became a national conversation in the way that it is right now, and you were sort of a little bit out of the spotlight during that, but very much involved in working through the company's management and its culture.

Yeah.

How did you manage to do that? Because culture can be pretty entrenched, and GoDaddy was very firmly in a lot of people's minds, probably inside the company too, this maverick.

Excellent. Okay, there's a lot there. So the first, I think there's a first fundamental premise, which is what GoDaddy does and did was create a way that ideas would get built online. And even from the founding of the company, there was an ethos of, care for the customer spirit, get up and do things that was pure. And, you know, you talk about culture and you talk about how companies evolve. And at the end of the day, you know, you can't spin your way to anything, right? Like you just wake up every day, you build great things, and you are, you are what you are. And if you have a great experience, then there's something to build from. And, and, you know, even the history of, you know, how TV ads were first built, you know, has a fascinating backstory where the founder of the company never took a dime of outside money, had built a software company that he sold to Intuit in the '90s. And I'm going to get the exact number wrong, but he sank close to $30 million of his own money into the company, was down to like the last couple of million bucks.

Right.

Like you talk about risk and entrepreneurialism, like it's stuff that, you know, you could live 100 lifetimes you wouldn't do. And had this great business that nobody heard of and was down to kind of the last shot and said, all right, well, I got to get attention. And, you know, then attention happened. Now flash forward 10 years and all of a sudden, if the need of the company isn't attention, it's intimacy and engagement and actually having everybody appreciate What a great customer experience GoDaddy is and was. Well, that started the next wave of evolution that, you know, many of the leadership team who joined the company in around 2012 and '13 kind of embarked on that journey.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I'll stop there.

Let's talk a little bit about what GoDaddy is, because it's come a long way from just, hey, get your domain from GoDaddy and maybe eventually build a website. You guys have a strategy that is really interesting for advancing the interest of small business in this mobile, social, increasingly digital marketplace. What are you doing?

Well, if you think about the first 20 years of getting an idea online, it was 3 things. It was a domain name, you had a website, and then that website was found by Google, right? Like literally, that's how the entire internet was built, which was a domain name, DNS queries were pulled from a website, content was up, and you were found by Google. Now today, if you're not just a small business, but you're an organization, you're a competitive soccer club, you're a church, like how you show up online is the most important thing that you do to get your idea into the world and honestly to connect with your members, customers, users. And so what we're doing is creating through our GoCentral platform in particular, a way that content not only gets pushed and created in an easy way onto a website, but also connected to different social media platforms.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, those are proliferating, as are applications like appointments, payments, invoicing that are all interconnected to your website. People have an expectation that you can do a lot more online, and we're providing the software and the tools to be able to make it happen, all backed with a world-class customer care team that if you need any amount of help at any point in time, not only with our stuff but with the complicated world of technology products, we're going to help you get there.

You're in your first year as CEO, but it's not your first time really with the title of CEO. For those of us who kind of watch some of the stagecraft of corporate leadership, this is particularly fascinating because you were interim CEO in 2012, 2013, I believe it was, before Blake Irving came in and was CEO. A lot of people, when they're in that position of being interim CEO, they want the top job. They don't get it, they leave.

Yeah.

You did not leave. Did you come close to leaving? What was it about the company, about what you saw coming that made you stick around and put you in this position now?

Yeah, so back to that time of what GoDaddy was and could be in 2012, I could see it, right? Like that this could be a global company, that what we did was really special. And if we built out our product portfolio and our experience, like what a cool thing to take a company that already had a fascinating foundation that in some ways was underappreciated. And with all the opportunity around it, what could it be? I also fell in love with the people at the company, right? Just the customers who we served and the company. And, you know, having Blake and when Blake joined, you know, it was helpful to me to— I got to help bring Blake in. Like, we needed to build out product and engineering depth, not on a onesie-twosie basis, but hiring hundreds of people. And Blake is a world-class tech exec who, you know, well-regarded and built a fantastic team. It was great to be able to stick around. And, you know, it's one of those things that I think it's a blessing to be in a position in life where, you know, when you find something that you really enjoy doing, and people you're doing it with, what else, you know, what else would you want to go do? So I'm so pleased, you know, I'm so pleased that, you know, I had the opportunity to honestly stay with the company.

There's a lot of heat around small business online right now. Amazon is chasing that group with its third-party marketplace. Of course, Etsy and eBay have always been doing that. Adobe just bought Magento, and that's getting pretty close to your space. So now Adobe isn't just helping people create the websites and, and track who's going there, but also now create these e-commerce marketplaces as well. Is that a threat to you? How do you position yourself with all of these huge and medium-sized players?

Totally, totally the right question, which What we do is we're helping ideas get online and increasingly connected. The nice thing about GoDaddy is we're typically early in an idea's lifecycle, right at the start or in its early formation.

I think I want to start a company. Let me get a domain name.

Yeah, and we're serving an audience that honestly typically has less than 10 or even less than 50 employees. It's truly the small audience that really is prosumer. And if you think about all the different, you know, whether it's Amazon or Adobe and all these other companies, they're either, you know, pick one. But Adobe is grounded in the enterprise. And even as they try to move and evolve in different ways, it's very different to go from serving enterprise to what's effectively a prosumer interaction. And at the end of the day, if we provide a great experience, Yes. Like a fantastic customer experience, which are product applications that are easy to use, super elegant, and we're able to wrap our care team around it and provide some human interaction when people struggle to interact with Apple and Microsoft and Google and all these different companies that provide tech but actually don't really help, you know, then we're— I think we're standing on 2 strong legs and we'll create you know, real differentiation relative to all those other larger companies.

Back to you.

Yeah.

When did you decide you wanted to be a CEO?

That's a good question. You know what? I never woke up 2012 even coming into the company deciding, saying I want to be a CEO. It just has never— so the idea of I want to be a CEO in that way. Never thought about it. You know, I'm a, I'm a team sport guy from growing up, and I love being a part of, you know, teams that go build something and win together. And in some ways you play, you know, a bunch of positions that are needed to play at the time.

Oh.

And that's a little bit of my journey over the last 6 years at the company. And I think where we're going now is building truly a global scaled company that modestly maybe is something that I'm bringing to the table. And with our evolution and now continuing it on at the company, it's an honor to, you know, have the title and the responsibility accorded to it. But it's, you know, not something that I woke up or said, oh my God, my life's fulfillment is to be the CEO.

Okay.

But it's a great responsibility and one, you know, that, that, that I'm both enjoying and, you know, So what is it that you have been driving for that got you here?

Because there are lots of other people who would like that job. Okay.

Or various other—

right?

Fair enough.

Who are gunning for that. So what were you aiming for where you kind of ended up hitting CEO?

You know, so here's, you know, based on my background, modestly, like how to take this company that had its roots in— had a domain name, which is online real estate. and, you know, care and customer care. And we're hiring thousands of people and growing around the world modestly. How, how and where we sequence things and strategically what we go do next, how you build up your product portfolio, how we actually build up an international operation and create a culture, you know, modestly, maybe that's something like I kind of bring some things to the table.

Because you got a Harvard MBA, right?

Yeah.

I mean, you got that for a reason.

Yeah.

Right?

You wanted to do something with it.

What is it about what you were good at or interested in? So here, I loved in college, I loved economics and microeconomics and figuring out how stuff works. And this is sort of, I'll try to make this sound as passionate as it was, 'cause it's hard to make that passionate, but just figuring out how stuff works and actually trying to say, Wow, there's a fundamental difference for how something can grow and build, right? And that a little bit is, you know, in economics, that's micro. And, you know, kind of like Moneyball and other things, you can apply data to figure out patterns that explains human behavior.

Mm-hmm.

Like, more than anything else, I thought that was cool. And that led me for 20 years into professional situations where I was learning and trying to build things and figure stuff out. You know, a lot of the time at KKR, one of the big private equity firms where, you know, basically that business is have an idea. And if you can make a company better, more valuable over a 5 to 7 year period of time, then you're doing your job. The intellectual craft of that was something that was totally stimulating to me. GoDaddy had a similar intellectual stimulation. with the added benefit of, God, I get to, you know, get to build something with a team and not do it as an intellectual exercise. But you're actually, you know, building something that, you know, works your brain and you do it with people that you really care about for an audience that, you know, you feel good about.

Give me the case for the systems CEO. Maybe this is a little unfair, but I mean, I think in our cultural mythology, we tend to get enthralled with the founder CEO, the the Bezos, the Jobs, the Gates, et cetera. And then sometimes we can learn to love the technical CEO, the Satya Nadella, the Shantanu Narayen who kind of come, but the marketing CEO tends to get less love perhaps than she or he might deserve. And then the system CEO, oh my goodness, this person came from private, but John Donahoe, right?

And yeah, yeah. And, you know, systems, you know, not to relabel, but, you know, Systems.

I was trying to give me a better word.

Yeah.

Strategy.

OK. And, you know, ability to actually build it or get it done. You know, I think if you look at and you go back on studies of successful leaders, you know, CEO Next Door, Good to Great, I think the common traits are less labels of vintage, meaning founder or tech It's having a match to the audience you're serving, right? A deep understanding of what your audience is. I think that's a little bit of a match. And what the company's trying to build and produce in the world, along with, I think, integrity and humility that over time, I think, shows up in successful leaders. that, you know, you were using a lot of tech names. But I think if you look across leaders across industries, like there's a combination of those things that, you know, is different from deep competence or whether you're a founder or not and are where a lot of successful leaders have come from.

I've never been a CEO, but I imagine that you're in a potentially precarious cultural situation right now. You've been through a pretty big transition. You've gone public relatively recently, and there's a question of what this company is really going to put down roots and become. How have you put in place either processes or traditions or hiring practices that you think are going to influence GoDaddy's culture for the long term?

That's a great question, and I will say my own motivation over the next couple years is to build a company that people around the world, when they think about something, they got an idea that they want to get online, they think about GoDaddy and creating a sustaining company that's going to be great not for a year or two, but for, you know, for a decade. So then how do you do it? Hiring people, creating trends, creating traditions. And the company has rallied around focusing on the experience of our customers. customers. Like, what we do is we're providing software. People subscribe to it. You're a customer for many, many years, right? Whether you're a product person, you're an engineer, you're a marketer, you're in care, each of our functions serve our customers and not in some theoretical way, right? Like, we provide direct software in an interactive way. Like, we touch customers in their lives every day. The The focus on every single step that a customer walks through and making it simple and clean and elegant has, I think, not only rallied the company internally, but given everybody a touchstone and a North Star that they can orient towards. That isn't, gosh, are we a backend technology company or what do our applications look like? The answer is make everything super elegant and simple at a customer level. And, you know, look, if you pull up GoDaddy and you walk through a bunch of journeys and flows, you will see points of friction. Drives me crazy, like drives now our company crazy. And that's in a good way, which is let's take every point of friction of using disconnected product applications and let's strip them out and do that with both engineering excellence and, you know, interesting ways to use things like AI and real people that I think will add value in the world. And it's culturally, I think that's the way to grab and create a real company that's going to succeed for a decade plus.

What's the one thing that you would point out for maybe even GoDaddy's smaller customers? What's the one thing that the smartest GoDaddy customers are doing that more small businesses should be doing?

Oh, they have connected their site content to their different points of social media and then are creating a way to interact with their customers in that audience. Now, we're trying to do that.

So Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever they might be.

Exactly. Restaurant on the other side and are using applications to connect those different ecosystems. And that's part of what we're trying to provide the tools to do, but our most successful customers who are time-starved are either using us or figuring out ways to do that.

It's a tech for efficiency. That's where the play is because they got a business to run.

Effectiveness. Yeah. Effect and elegance. But that's right. That's exactly right.

That's good stuff.

Hey, Scott, I enjoyed it.

Thank you for sitting down.

No, thank you. Appreciate it.

I'm John Forte from CNBC, and this has been Fort Knox: Rich Ideas and Powerful People. Subscribe wherever fine podcasts are distributed and check out the reviews on iTunes.

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